City Year is an awesome organization. It’s comprised of young adult volunteers that teach children in various cities throughout the U.S., plus a new branch in Johannesburg, South Africa. Read on!

City Year

City Year volunteers do more than just teach children, but I wanted to focus on that aspect. I decided to design a poster to be displayed in urban areas at public locations such as libraries and college campuses. At these places, the viewers of the poster would obviously be committed to learning and literacy, so I wanted to take advantage of that. In urban areas, crime is obviously a concern, so I decided to see what kind of statistics there were connecting illiteracy to crime. Oh boy…they’re pretty horrifying.

So, I decided to go with that. I also wanted to highlight the “year” aspect of the program because it’s exactly that–a year-long program. When I read some statistics about the average amount of time spent in prison, I got my idea.

(c) Amy E. Rumbarger 2009

This would be an 11×17″ poster to be printed on a newsprint or recycled-type paper and posted in the locations I mentioned above.

At this size it’s hard to read, so here’s the headline and copy:

“365 days is nothing compared to the average 2670 days an inmate spends behind bars.”

“The correlation between illiteracy and time spent in prison is astounding. Give a year to help teach youths across America and prevent them from spending years of their lives in prison.”

*IMPORTANT: Do not quote me on the statistic in the poster. I averaged numbers in several different reports to get this number because I couldn’t find one conclusive number.

The Aftermath

How do you feel about this ad? I like the concept behind it and I’m ok with the visual, but I wish I had been able to find the exact imagery I wanted. But that’s always the issue, isn’t it? I also would’ve liked to spend more time on the type, but I think that’s my own fault because I was so indecisive about this one.

Given more time, what would you have done differently? As I said before, photo-searching is always the most time-consuming and frustrating aspect and it’s nice to have a good amount of time to deal with that. I also would’ve liked to spend more time on the type, but I think that’s my own fault because I was so indecisive about this one.

How would you extend this into a campaign? I think this could be connected to other statistics…comparing the numbers to 365 days or 8,760 hours (the number of hours in a year) or 12 months. I would definitely have to scour some reports for useful information though–it was hard enough to find this statistic! They need to make this information more readily available, whomever “they” are.

Day 16 complete! Come back tomorrow for more, and for now, feel free to comment, e-mail me, or follow me on Twitter.